Buried deep within the changelog of Android 4.1.2 that arrived today is a very welcomed change to the way expandable notifications are handled by the OS. Introduced in Jelly Bean, expanding and collapsing notifications originally required two fingers to operate. Not anymore! A handy gesture now allows easy expansion and collapsing with just one finger, making it easier to perform this task while holding a device in one hand.

Collapsing is a little tricky at first and requires first pulling down and then up.

Android maintainer "JBQ" just broke the news that Android 4.1.2 was being released into AOSP today, and now we're hearing that a matching OTA update is being pushed to the Nexus 7 as we speak. It's 31.3MB in size, and the build number JZO54K. If you're not finding the update when you check, don't worry - it'll get there. The rollout is likely staggered and limited to a smaller group of devices to start.

Google's chief release engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru just announced via the Android Building group that version 4.1.2 of Android is being released to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) today.

The release follows Android 4.1.1, which was the final version of Jelly Bean, and is marked as minor. The build number, which we spotted in the logs yesterday, is JZO54K, while the AOSP tags are android-4.1.2_r1 and jb-mr0-release.

It's also a good time to bring up the fact that the LG Nexus prototype that we saw yesterday was also running 4.1.2.

Google just pushed an update v4.1.2 to the Gmail app (up from 4.1.1 and 4.0.5) that brings a few enhancements to Android 4.0+ devices, including improved support for 7" tablets. The full changelog for this update reads as follows: